No Rush

I've removed all personal deadlines on this one. Except for one.

© Ross Brown

When I finished writing Songsaengnim: A Korea Diary, made all the edits, and sent it to the publisher to print, I was excited and pumped to work hard on the sequel, Gyeosunim. I hoped that within two years, it would be in print and I could turn my attention to other projects.

That was in 2012.

And while work did begin in earnest at the time, with nine chapters completed by the end of that year, the same thing happened to Gyeosunim as what had happened when I wrote the first half of Songsaengnim: I didn't like it. I didn't like the one-dimensional aspect. I wanted to have two story lines.

With my first novel in this series, I wanted to introduce another storyline, and so I introduced flashbacks, created Roland Axam's back-story. He needed to have a strong reason to go to Korea. (I had already written several short stories about Roland, and even though none of them had been published, I needed some continuity for myself.)

Gyeosunim has three storylines. While the main story continues immediately after Songsaengnim, in 1998, the story also looks back to another major, life-altering moment of Roland's past, in 1988, and also brings some closure to the end of Songsaengnim, but in the future, in 2019.

From 2012 to 2019, I sort of dragged my ass with the work on the novel, working out timelines and plots, but doing very little writing. It wasn't until I went back to South Korea, nearly three years ago, that I was able to do some serious work on my book. I had actually believed that I could finish the book by the fall of 2019 and have it published at the beginning of 2020.

That deadline came and went.

While I continued to write—even taking a hiatus from The Brown Knowser—my work slowed and then almost came to a complete stop after the pandemic started. COVID is not an excuse for my procrastination: it merely had me looking at other projects that I had put off since Songsaengnim had gone to the publisher.

I had always wanted  to do a YouTube version of my blog and I started focusing on that in 2020 (having actually created The Brown Knowser channel in late 2019). And recently, I promised myself that I would produce at least one video a month on my channel.

That takes up a lot of time.

I'm still writing, still working on Gyeosunim, but I no longer seem to be in a rush to get it out. I would like to have this sequel on bookshelves by the time I retire, so that's the only deadline that I've given myself. This means that you should expect to see it within the next three to eight years.

Hopefully, well before then.

In the meantime, I'll continue to post excerpts from the rough drafts on my blog. The next one will be this Friday.

Stay tuned.